Wangan Midnight is based on the manga and now anime series of the same name, which follows young males who at night meet up to race their beefed up vehicles along a stretch of outer-city motorway known as the ‘Wangan’. Souped-up cars: check; racing at night: check; racing along a stretch of motorway: check; Shutokou Battle in different clothing: indeed.

This would have been acceptable if Genki had actually learned from previous entries in the Shutokou Battle series and improved the formula. Regrettably, they have not, and therefore Wangan Midnight just feels like the end of the road for a series that has failed to evolve or improve over the last two generations. The game still feels exactly the same as it did in its first Dreamcast appearance.

Racing against one to three competitors along the motorway at breakneck speed, diving in and out of traffic and avoiding lane closures should provide an exhilarating, edge of your seat experience. This isn’t the case in Wangan Midnight; instead the player is supposed to enjoy an unresponsive handling model, which horribly understeers before suddenly snapping into an uncontrollable slide just as the car seems to be heading in the direction it has been pointed. Combine this with a frame rate that sucks all feeling of speed away yet, at the same time, makes crashing into the back of traffic an unavoidable and all too regular occurrence, and you have the foundation for a truly awful experience. When a seven year old game such as Crazy Taxi makes skipping between traffic such a complete joy, it is disappointing to see that Genki have still failed to deliver this, even with the extra power that today's hardware affords them.

The hope would be that maybe the extra power went into the graphics, which have always been a strong point of the series. The car models are excellent and the anime-type look that has been applied to the visuals gives it a unique aesthetic. However, the frame rate issues already mentioned, along with the general blandness of the surroundings and the fact that all the races take place at night, mean that it is hard to be overly impressed. Add to this the fact that there are only three other generic types of vehicle on the road (car, van and truck), without even any colour variations, and it is clear that more time and effort should have gone into the visuals.

The main single player experience on offer is also pretty shocking. Genki racing games usually come equipped with an absorbing single player career-type mode, where cars are purchased and upgrades are bought as the player makes their way through the game. Due to the license, Wangan Midnight eschews this in favour of following the story of the anime series from the point of view of each of the main characters. Completing a certain number of events in the first character’s story opens up another character’s plotline and so on.

The major disappointment is that all of the personalisation apparent in Genki’s other games is missing here. Upgrades are not bought, but are instead simply handed out via a random card system, similar to that seen in the Initial D game on the PSP. Even when adjustments are made, they are very rarely physically seen on the car, with some of them even representing abilities rather than internal or external upgrades. The player is also forced to use the car driven by the corresponding character in the anime, which results in the story mode becoming very much a third-person type experience, and is much less compelling because of it.

By this point, the only saving grace left for Wangan Midnight could be the online battle mode, where 2-4 players can square off against one another on any of the motorway routes available in the game. Unfortunately, the online racing experience is perhaps one of the least entertaining ever devised. The tracks themselves offer little to no challenge, with a maximum of one or two corners, if any, found on most of them. In addition, there is no normal traffic in the online modes, meaning that the winner will invariably be the person who has unlocked the best car and most card abilities in the story mode. It is incredibly soul destroying to just see an opponent rush off into the distance without any chance of ever catching them and this makes the online experience a decidedly lonely and frustrating one.

Possibly the only thing that can be commended in Wangan Midnight is the music throughout the game, which is pretty nifty if Euro-Beat is your steedz. However, it still doesn’t compare to Yuzo Koshiro's stellar work on the soundtrack of Namco’s Wangan Midnight: Maximum Tune arcade series. In fact, a straightforward port of Maximum Tune 3 would have been preferable to this clapped-out engine of a game. It may share many of the same issues, but the handling is far better and the tuning system and story are innumerably more impressive than those found in Genki’s effort.

It is hard to think of any reason to recommend Wangan Midnight on the PlayStation 3. It is a shoddy, ill-conceived game that feels as if it has been rushed out to coincide with the release of the Wangan Midnight anime series in Japan. It is best described as a tuning culture game but without a proper tuning system, and so therefore it is worthless, even for fans of the manga and anime. The Shutokou Battle series was originally inspired by the Wangan Midnight manga and it may be that license that has now killed off the series. We can only hope Genki return to form when the Kaido Battle series makes its debut on the next-gen platforms.